Brand new BT Infinity 2 line, packet loss?

I previously had Virgin Broadband, using the superhub in modem mode with a Cisco E4200 connected as the router. I had the thinkbroadband quality monitor pointed to this connection (and still do for another couple of weeks) and it all worked perfectly - http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/24c77bdbe90...

I recently had BT infinity installed which came with the Home Hub 5. Wanting to use my own router I set it up with my router as the DMZ on the HH5 and this worked fine. When I initially set up the tb broadband quality monitor, everything looked great - much lower and far more stable ping than on my Virgin connection, however after a few hours the graph showed massive packet loss, but the connection still seemed fine and latency was low so I wasn't too bothered, thinking it was just a blip. However it has continued over the past week.

I thought it might be the setup with the BT HH5 DMZing to my router, however I installed a Huawei HG612, with the PPPoE settings in the E4200 to use it as a modem and the packet loss has continued on the quality monitor:

Does anybody have any idea what is causing this? Do BT place a low priority on incoming ICMP packets coming into their residential connections? In any case I'm not massively fussed since the connection appears to be stable, just a little annoyed that the monitoring results are now far less useful!

Re: Brand new BT Infinity 2 line, packet loss?

While most people get zero BQM from the HH5 since it has ICMP Ping echo disabled, your BQM looks nothing like what others on BT who have swapped out hardware are getting.

A big difference is with VM you used DHCP mode, with VDSL the Cisco is running in PPPoE and there may be an issue there, some routers have been seen to produce odd results now and then and firmware updates fix it a lot of the time.

Re: Brand new BT Infinity 2 line, packet loss?

FWIW the E4200 is not a real Cisco box, but a Linksys box, and they're now owned by Belkin.

Its possible with the load of doing both the PPPoE and the routing the 4200 is overloaded and dropping packets. Cable doesn't require the PPP overhead and as the line speeds go up it takes more and more CPU to cope.

Other routers have had to do PPPoE in hardware (e.g. Asus, TPLink) to solve this; as the CPU's couldn't keep up with the higher VDSL speeds.

This might explain why I'm getting an initial burst at full line speed which falls intermittently away after a few seconds. I'm running Tomato 1.28 on the E4200 which I put on it when I got it 3 years ago, and it looks like that's still the latest version, so probably quite out of date.

I'll try PPPoE on the HG612, but the issue of packet loss started while I was still using the HH5, effectively in the equivalent of modem mode (DMZ to the E4200) so not sure if this is the cause.

Downloading a file will start at 7-8mb/s then fall back to 1-2mb/s within 10 seconds. It will spike back up to 7-8mb/s randomly over the duration of the download for a few seconds before falling back down. Is this something I should rase with BT re. my line?http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

You can't do speed tests over wireless if you want to raise faults with your ISP. You should repeat the test with a wired Ethernet connection. You might also want to have just the HH5 without a DMZ setting.

Also don't keep swapping the device attached to the BT telephone point. You don't want DLM thinking there is a fault.

I would suggest connecting the HG612 to the wall and leaving it turned on. Then you can use the HH5 by connecting ethernet to the WAN port, or your E4200, or any other router or PC with ethernet.